In the weeks, then months, following Brendan’s arrest, Selena McCrickard had to drive to work past the fire damage. Slowly, the blackness on either side of the road began to change. Tiny shoots pushed their way through the charred ground. Tree ferns that had been burnt to stumps unfurled new green fronds, the showy ones at the funeral. Plants that needed fire to trigger a grand seed release or to crack their seeds open now had ash-rich and fire-warmed soil to stimulate their growth, and the forest’s cleared canopies meant there was no competition for light.
On different days the vivid shoots could look miraculous or pitiful, depending on her mood. They could look like a flashback: an epicormic bud that may have been lying dormant under the tough bark of a eucalypt for years, decades even, would sprout bright red leaves, as if in budding these little tongues of flame the trees were acting out what had happened, the forest also unable to forget the fire.
With a rape or an assault case, the damage was hidden or close to buried, denied. Here, it was everywhere. She’d turn a bend in the road and glimpse another crime scene. The trees brazen co-conspirators, because of course the eucalypts were made for this crime of fire.
In the weeks after Black Saturday, animal shelters around the state weren’t treating as many creatures as they’d expected. The burning bush had been too severe for most to escape. Selena had a series of pets from rescue homes – she’d even offered to care for Brendan’s dog – and details of dead wildlife and animals were among the saddest sections of the police witness statements she read. The RSPCA calculated that one million animals were killed in the fires or died afterwards, from starvation or as easy prey. The Victorian Association of Forest Industries estimated this figure to be in the millions. Ash in streams decimated aquatic life, and surviving animals on the ground would have to endure the winter until spring provided cover and food. If it did. There were areas where fire had killed everything, burning through the surface of the earth and cooking the layers of sediment, like clay in a kiln. It could take decades, possibly longer, for certain species to return.
Some of the places she drove past had no regrowth, just a sooty palette of greys. Then, to prove the fire’s inconstancy, the road would curve and she’d find new shoots clothing the trunks and branches of eucalypts in moss-like buds, and later a profusion of bright stems. Within a few months of Black Saturday, the trees resembled maypoles, wrapped in curling red and green ribbons. The forest a kind of pageant.
Selena would then turn into the wide, empty streets of Morwell, park outside Legal Aid, and brace herself for a day of more fire.
To facilitate Brendan’s assessment by a forensic psychologist, she needed to provide her client’s basic history. Brendan could not easily give her a coherent outline of his childhood. His cognitive impairment was no doubt part of the problem, although she began to suspect he also didn’t want to remember it.
‘I’d like to talk to your mum and dad,’ she had eventually told him. ‘I need to ask about when you were a kid, and how you were at school, because it’s going to be important later.’ He gave his permission.
Selena knew that Brendan Sokaluk’s parents, Kaz and Lou, had barely been leaving the house. It was the same modest brick place they’d lived in for nearly forty years, but in the days after their son’s arrest, reporters waited out the front. Cameramen followed anyone coming or going, and long after the cameras left, the Sokaluks felt they were under surveillance. Even the simplest social transaction became excruciating. To send a letter at the post office meant readying themselves for the gaze of the whole community, including the postmaster, whose house had burnt down. Any unknown mail they opened gingerly. A death threat had been sent to them via the Herald Sun, prompting the local police to ask if they’d consider getting out of town for a while.
No, they’d answered: if they ran, they might have to keep running. Better to stay, with the curtains drawn, and hope there’d been a mistake.
Selena would later read, in the finalised police brief of evidence, that when the Arson Squad detectives knocked on the door and told Kaz his son had been arrested for lighting the fires, he immediately replied, ‘No, I don’t think he’d do that.’
The detectives were in the living room when Lou came home. They told her why they were there, and noted that she turned to her husband, saying, ‘I don’t really think he would, would he?’ Even as Lou spoke, the barrister imagined, life as she knew it slid out from under her.
When Selena called to introduce herself, Lou asked warily, ‘How do I know it’s not someone pretending to be you?’ She also wondered if her phone was bugged.
Selena said that Brendan’s calls from the prison were most likely being recorded, and indeed, later some were transcribed and tendered as evidence.
On his son’s first call home, Kaz, after checking Brendan was okay, was blunt:
Kazimir: ‘Did you do it or not?’
Brendan: ‘I don’t think I did.’
Kazimir: ‘What do you mean, you don’t think?’
Brendan: ‘I think it’s a bit more accidental . . . plus those two coppers, they said if I helped them they would let me go home. So, I reckon I was set up probably . . . they just attacked and bullied sort of thing and I tried to explain . . . it’s an accident . . . I can’t burn a forest down, I love it too much . . .’
Everything had happened so quickly. When the Sokaluks realised that Brendan was at the police station, Kaz had gone around there and pleaded for his son to be given a lawyer. He’d told the coppers Brendan wouldn’t be capable of knowing he needed one, even if one was offered. Kaz believed he’d been fobbed off: the police just looked him over and calculated they could ignore him. This felt like a legal mugging, as though his son had suddenly been snatched – and, worse, as though the authorities had needed someone to blame, fast, and Brendan was an easy target. Everyone knew that Brendan usually spoke ‘rubbish’, ‘a load of rot’: what if he had confessed to dropping a cigarette butt to get out of the watch-house cells and back to his little dog?
When Kaz and Lou Sokaluk arrived in the interview room of Morwell Legal Aid – a space with frosted-glass walls, industrial furniture and carpet in a vivid shade – Selena knew it was a big deal for Lou to have even left the house.
Brendan’s mother was in her late fifties. She had been athletic in her youth and remained a strong woman, with a kind but plain-spoken manner. Her son’s features were visible in her round face, but she would light up and reveal anger or distress or suspicion – and later her humour. It took a while for people to see Lou’s softer side. But Brendan had told his mother that the lawyer had opened up her wallet in the assessment prison and given him fifty dollars, and Selena guessed this wasn’t a small amount of money to Lou. Kaz had long been unemployed, and Lou worked on a dairy farm, milking. She tried to pay the money back but Selena wouldn’t take it. The barrister got the feeling that not many people had shown this woman’s son much kindness.
McCrickard asked Lou to dig out Brendan’s old school reports and any medical records she could find. She also needed an account of Brendan’s life, and so the couple tried to tell his story.
Louise and Kazimir Sokaluk had moved to the Latrobe Valley early in the 1970s, hoping for a better future for their children. The government-owned coal industry looked like it would provide the security to raise their toddler, Brendan, and Jamie, his younger brother. Kaz found a job at the Hazelwood Power Station as a trimmer. It was dirty work, using shovels or rakes to keep the coal level on the conveyer belts, and cleaning up spills off the belt or dredger. But Kaz had known hardship. He’d immigrated from Poland as a small child, his family postwar refugees who settled near Lou’s home town north of Melbourne. The pay at Hazelwood was good enough for them to buy their own house, at a rate subsidised by the State Electricity Commission.
In those days, Churchill had a population of 2500. People were moving in from the nearby town of Yallourn, which was being razed for the coal underneath. In Yallourn, in winter, a fog full of coal dust would lift at 11 am then descend again a few hours later. In summer, you couldn’t take your baby out in the pram for some sun: the brown particles fell on everything outside, and settled inside on food and furniture.
In Churchill, though, the air was clean and the neighbourhood was full of other young families with small children. You didn’t have to lock your doors. Kids played outside and only returned when the streetlights came on.
The Sokaluks had a third son. Money was tight, but it was the same for everyone. Around the street, those with television sets would move them to their front window and their neighbours would join them in the garden to watch programs together. Local women steadfastly baked and fundraised for a swimming pool, but, lore had it, their money went to the production of the Big Cigar. So instead, people took their kids swimming in the power station’s pondage, a 520-hectare, man-made lake filled with coolant water. Waste heat kept the pondage at a bath-like forty degrees.
By the time Brendan reached kindergarten age, his mother knew that he was different to other kids. He started school with limited speech and was unable to control his bowels. Doctors suspected he was brain-damaged after a long and difficult labour. Lou, who was then working full-time in a Morwell factory making electrical equipment, took her son regularly to speech therapy. She wondered if it helped. At school, unable to easily communicate, Brendan found it hard to learn to read or write. Other children scorned the boy. He grew to prefer his own company.
His mother tried to find ways to include him in the town’s life. She took him to soccer lessons, where before long he was surrounded by other children who were all kicking him. No adult intervened. It was as though no one knew what do and so, in their awkwardness, did nothing. Lou took Brendan back home, but with limited activities available for kids in the town, they returned the next week. Again the other children set upon him, and again none of the other parents – her neighbours and acquaintances – moved to stop them.
This new community had no old people, no history, and no long-running feuds, but also no deep-rooted connections. In such a small town, everyone knew everyone else, and everyone knew Brendan had difficulties. But people had come here to make a new beginning, and this boy was not what they’d pictured. Did they feel that his strangeness reflected badly on them? Or that if they got too close it could be catching? Lou had always got along well with the disabled people she’d known: Kaz had a younger brother with Down syndrome whom she adored. In a mental black book she silently recorded the attitudes of otherwise good people, many of whom she considered friends.
Brendan never played sport again, nor joined any other club. In his presence, people were casually cruel: ‘vegie’ or ‘retard’ or ‘spastic’ slid easily off their tongues. He had no friends, and a mania for sameness. If Lou moved his things when she dusted his room, she’d return to find them rearranged exactly the way they’d been. Once, when a substitute teacher took his primary school class, Brendan hid in a cupboard and had a frenzied tantrum when the other teachers tried to drag him back to the classroom.
But he did love to draw. He drew plans of buildings and, panning out further, maps of the area where they lived. In these pictures there was an uncanny aerial perspective. Brendan had never been on a plane (even at the time of his arrest he’d never flown anywhere), but he would draw Churchill from above, making adjustments where he thought necessary. He redesigned the town – and thus his life – in the only way he could. This stolid, clumsy child floating high above his tormenters. The forest and the roads and the buildings all free of people.
There was one boy, Lou told Selena, perhaps five years older than Brendan, who often appeared by the side of the road with his bike, which had a tall, orange safety flag attached. He was the only other noticeably disabled child in Churchill. He’d stand waving at passing cars. Most people ignored him but Lou always made sure she returned his wave. Her house backed onto the local police station, and one time she heard a policeman giving a belting to teenagers who’d been bullying the boy. Part of her wished someone would do that for her son.
When Brendan reached high school age he attended Morwell Technical College, a fifteen-minute bus ride away. His mother felt he’d do better in life if he went through the regular system rather than to a special school. But Morwell Tech was as tough as schools come, in a town where, depending on the wind, some days a ripe sulphuric smell descended, not from the power station, but the nearby paper mill. Depending on other factors, Brendan would routinely be set upon.
One day, he got off the school bus with faeces smeared on his back, courtesy of a student. Another day, he returned home with globs of mucous that his tormentors had coughed up and spat into his hair. He still had trouble controlling his bowels, and if he soiled himself on the school bus he was treated like he was the shit. A subhuman with a surname easily turned to Suck-a-lot or Suck-a-cock. The codes of teenagers, and their capacity for cruelty, were incomprehensible to him. Each bus ride offered a unique form of torture, until his parents pulled him out of school at the end of year 11. He had passed nothing. He could barely read or write.
Lou helped her son find a few menial jobs. He was always laid off, but in 1988 his luck seemed to change. Through a special program for the disabled he managed to gain employment as an assistant gardener at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education, soon to be amalgamated with the prestigious Monash University.
The institute sat awkwardly within Churchill. Very few of the academics lived in the town, and if any of the snobbier lecturers’ children attended as undergraduates it was considered mildly embarrassing. The campus had been founded in the 1920s as a technical school to train SEC workers for the local power stations, and later the faculties were expanded to remedy the high dropout rate for Gippsland students at campuses in Melbourne. An engineering department was established because, the SEC found, the wives of electrical engineers needed in the power stations didn’t want to come and live in the Valley. By training local engineers, the rationale went, they’d marry local girls and stay.
For academics, the Gippsland campus lacked prestige but was a pleasant, low-pressure place to work. On the far reaches of the empire as it was, no one high up saw or particularly cared what was going on. Most students were the first in their families to attend university, and if any showed signs of excellence they tended to be funnelled back to the campus in the city. Many of the administrators were ex-SEC, and the commission’s informal motto of ‘Slow, Easy and Comfortable’ applied to this work environment too. There was a golf course within the grounds. There was also a culture of graft and corruption. Once, the university took an inventory and found that one-third of their computers had been taken. Everyone was in the habit of looking the other way, enjoying the vista of sweeping, immaculately kept lawns.
Lou Sokaluk believed Brendan had arrived at his gardening job relatively innocent. But in this town everyone knew your rank in the hierarchy, and he was now spending his days with the siblings and friends of the kids who’d tormented him throughout school – people often with their own issues, who had no training in working alongside someone with special needs. (Selena reckoned that having a disability in the Valley, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, would have just given local folk another reason to pick on you. Brendan was the butt of jokes amongst people who were themselves the butt of jokes: when you feel downtrodden, she supposed, it’s a relief to find someone else to tread on.)
Here was a backward eighteen-year-old who still suffered from incontinence. Perhaps thinking he was acting in the spirit of his place of work, he tried to engage his colleagues with boastful stories and practical jokes. He would hide in bushes then jump out when a co-worker came looking for him; he would sneak up behind other gardeners and tap them on the shoulder, chortling – the stunts of a kindergarten child. The gardening staff almost uniformly resented working with someone so irritating, and who needed near-constant supervision.
Years went by and Brendan’s parents helped organise him to buy a house not far from them. Selena could see in the police photographs where his mother had set about furnishing it, adding doilies and knick-knacks, some pictures on the walls. Lou gave him a weekly allowance from his wages (otherwise Brendan would spend it all at once) and used what was left to pay his bills and mortgage. For a while – long before Alexandra – Brendan had another live-in girlfriend and he’d installed ramps to the door for her wheelchair, but this relationship didn’t last either.
The region to which Lou and Kaz had relocated to give their sons a better chance must have been rapidly changing. By the mid-1990s, Kaz had already been pensioned off for a decade with his bad back, and the SEC was about to be privatised. When a conservative Victorian government split up and sold the state-owned power assets, over 7500 people lost their jobs in the Valley, and the 23 billion dollars in sales profit flowed elsewhere.
Instantly, the region became a different kind of place. There had always been poverty hidden in the hills, but now the towns were also full of people on benefits. Those who stayed watched a rust belt form in real time. The Valley became a human sink, a place people ended up.
Sometimes, as Selena drove to work and saw Hazelwood in the distance, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Youngstown’ came to mind. He sang of smokestacks stretching into a dirty sky like the arms of a deity, the rise of industry and the looming fall. Along with the song’s narrator a lot of the people Selena met felt they had been forgotten. They lived beyond the sight of those with influence, amidst the symbols of the unloved past.
The eight chimneystacks of Hazelwood were now the iconic image of the country’s dysfunctional climate policy and an emblem for the campaign against global warming. The power station was the dirtiest in the OECD, reportedly pumping 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the skies each year, although the figure was probably conservative. It turned out the total emissions from Hazelwood Power Station weren’t actually measured. Once every six months the discharge was recorded from one stack at a time, but that was it. No one really knew how much particulate matter floated around, and in the meantime the state government’s Environment Protection Authority sold the company owning the mine, International Power, emergency approvals to pollute further, including into the Morwell River.
It wasn’t surprising that many locals were distrustful of authority. Why put your faith in the power companies that slashed jobs and safety standards? Or in politicians – even the ones championing coal – who didn’t want to talk about the local kids with asthma and other respiratory problems, or about the adults here, who lost more years to disease than in any other region in Victoria. And no one saw environmentalists crying themselves to sleep over those who’d be left behind if Hazelwood or the other power stations ever closed.
The Latrobe Valley’s brown coal deposits, the biggest in the world, stretched for sixty-four kilometres in one direction, fifteen kilometres the other, with a depth of 180 metres. The towns clung to the coal. Morwell sat on the very edge of a mind-bending pit, and to Selena it could feel like it was close to falling in. The highway and the Morwell River had both been diverted to extend the mine’s lifespan. And older people were reminded of when Yallourn’s Olympic-size swimming pool, cricket and football grounds, cinema, croquet lawns, avenues of trees, golf course, schools and library, not to mention houses, were all demolished to get to the coal underneath. Geology ruled the Valley. And it was as if the volatility of the coal affected those who lived alongside it. Brown coal is unstable – two-thirds water when pulled out of the ground and highly combustible. People’s friends and family worked cutting the stuff out, burning it, and then everyone breathed in the vapours of strife.
Soon those bare walls in McCrickard’s office were covered in butcher’s paper. Mapping out the brief of evidence was the only way she could get her head around the multitude of witnesses who had seen Brendan on Black Saturday, or had some tale to tell about his past.
This brief was coming to her in stages. The police were waiting on various laboratory tests, and some people weren’t yet ready to be interviewed, while others needed to be interviewed again. Nevertheless, the document was already vast, the index of witness statements resembling a phonebook.
Selena spent long hours, pen in hand, reading meticulously through each statement, then rereading for what she may have missed. Arson is a difficult crime to prove and it’s the granular detail that convicts or acquits most people. Text messages, phone calls, time-stamped security footage. Small things could be vital, and she couldn’t skim over any evidence, any of the countless incidental details of horror.
A man who had a resident koala on his block found it dead at the base of its favourite tree. A woman discovered unburnt magpies all over her property, their wings still outstretched as if they’d just dropped from an airless sky. Someone had lost letters that were the only link to a loved one who was gone. The war medals, or model aeroplane collection, or essential work tools, or family photographs – everything tangible and intangible that a house, a shed, a farm, a life, contains – all of it had burned.
And yet, as more information came in, two main possibilities were opening up for Brendan’s defence.
The first was timing: witnesses had wildly different recollections about the fire’s beginning. As was common in bushfires, people were in their houses with the air conditioner cranked up, oblivious to what was unfolding; asked when they first noticed smoke or flames – or Brendan – they came up with very different answers. Brendan was at the local service station at 1.16 pm. Could it be proved that he’d had time to drive to the plantation to light a fire just after 1.30 pm? His car engine was playing up and he had to drive slowly. How fast could he have actually travelled? The Arson Squad had sourced a similar car to test the potential speed, but how could they replicate Brendan’s specific mechanical problem?
The second issue was McCrickard’s concern that Brendan was going to be railroaded because of his psychological and intellectual impairments. A lot of people feel intimidated, even threatened, by ‘strange’ people. It was almost natural for the community to make a series of assumptions ending in, ‘Oh well, if he was up there, it would have been him.’
The barrister thought that in preparing the brief the police had ‘over-egged the omelette’. The focus should have been on what the witnesses had observed, not hearsay about hearsay. Much of her initial focus was therefore on trying to nail down exactly who had seen what, and to cut through the bias in statements made by people who thought her client was weird.
A charismatic 23-year-old off-road motorcycle racing champion had been arrested for lighting the Delburn blaze. The police alleged he set a series of fires after discovering his girlfriend had been unfaithful to him. Did he look like a textbook arsonist? As Brendan Sokaluk did? Not at all.
In May, the police recorded Brendan sounding off about their lack of progress catching the real arsonist. Kaz asked about what was by then a local rumour, that there had been someone else in the hills that day, who may be the culprit:
Brendan: ‘They know who it is but they’re too lazy to get off their arse and go down there and shut the whole bloody fire department down and question them properly . . .’
Kazimir: ‘Did you see a motorbike up there?’
Brendan: ‘Saturday?’
Kazimir: ‘Yeah.’
Brendan: ‘Um, I only remember seeing a vehicle that cut me and Brocky off. We were looking in the bushes for rubbish and then I saw it again . . . I drew a picture and gave it to the lawyer.’
Except he hadn’t given it to her.
To be sure, Brendan’s story still slid around. And as McCrickard worked on his defence, she wondered if he’d dropped a cigarette, as he claimed, or if there had indeed been someone else near the plantation that day. What if there was truth in the idiotic-sounding story he’d put in his Crime Stoppers report? She was worried that Brendan had happened to be up there near the fire and stayed around because he was fascinated by it all. During his late-night police interview, he’d mentioned having long ago been a member of the Churchill CFA – as with most of his endeavours, his parents told her, that hadn’t worked out. Perhaps he’d stuck around Glendonald Road just wanting to be helpful, but instead got blamed by people who put ‘two and two together’. Had Brendan believed their addition and convinced himself he was responsible?
It is criminology 101 that a defence lawyer doesn’t discuss the fine details of a case with the client until the finalised brief of evidence is served by police – ‘They say this, what do you say?’ There’s no point starting to take instructions with evolving information; the already overwhelming process only becomes even harder. And in Brendan’s case it was uncertain if he was capable of ever giving instructions. If he couldn’t outline his version of events in regard to the allegations against him, he would enter a whole other legal realm. Defence lawyers want their clients to be found fit to plead: the alternative to a trial is indefinite incarceration in a psychiatric facility, a fate uniformly regarded as one to be avoided.
The process of having Brendan psychologically assessed was taking its time. Not least because when the first specialist visited him in prison, Brendan, heeding his barrister’s warning, had refused to talk. The next step, legally, was the committal hearing, to test whether there was sufficient evidence to proceed to trial. There was no requirement for Brendan to put up a defence at this hearing and so, while the question of his capacity was being determined, Selena kept adding information to her butcher-papered walls.
Inevitably, many of the witness statements she read reflected the community’s grief and resentment. A common theme was that Brendan was a sly, calculating man. She had seen this in other cases: accusers insisting that the accused was feigning his symptoms of intellectual disability, ‘putting it on’. The great social contradiction, as Selena saw it, was the general forbearance shown people with mental disabilities, and acceptance of their need for understanding – but not if they do that. When a mentally ill person did something heinous, goodwill vanished in an instant, and the radio shock jocks were soon telling an audience eager to believe in their own righteousness and sound mental health that the impairment was fake.
Brendan’s former colleagues at the university believed he had played up his disability when it suited him. In the brief of evidence, Peter Townsend was quoted: ‘One day when I was working with Brendan I told him during a conversation that he didn’t seem that stupid. In my opinion, Brendan had the mentality of a student in year 7 or 8 . . . Brendan told me that when he had to be assessed he’d froth at the mouth and talk silly so the people would think he’s mentally impaired. Brendan never used to try this at work when he got in trouble because we all knew he wasn’t that stupid.’
Brendan’s supervisor had told the Arson Squad detectives: ‘Brendan is the most cunning person I have ever met. I am aware that he may have a mental impairment of sorts though he uses this to his own advantage. I felt he exaggerates the impairment. Brendan is a smarter person than what people give him credit for. He would mumble and make himself difficult to understand in certain circumstances and then speak in a clear and coherent manner at other times.’
The supervisor cited as evidence of Sokaluk’s intelligence his almost photographic memory of where pipes and cables were located on campus. When underground infrastructure needed updating, the gardeners could rely on Brendan to recall exactly where equipment had previously been buried. He was also, they claimed, very technologically literate. ‘He knew a mile more than anyone else about computers and phones and things.’
Again, McCrickard knew that people could find it hard to understand how someone can be adequate, or even talented, at one skill, but otherwise operate on a completely different plane. Typically, the proficiencies of someone like Brendan were the result of protracted efforts to find ways of earning respect and fitting in. They weren’t markers of his average ability.
‘I didn’t light any fires. But I’ll put my hand up, like at Monash,’ Brendan had said when he was arrested, intimating he’d been wrongly accused before.
By the end of his time at the university, Brendan had begun taking antidepressants to deal with his anxiety and low moods, which were, he said, due to being his colleagues’ ‘punching bag’. They found him unpredictable and lazy. Once when a colleague went looking for him, and found Brendan had wandered away, he received the text message: I have to see my doctor for my happy pills so I can be normal like use.
The gardeners believed that because Brendan had been employed as part of a special program, he could not easily be fired. If they complained about his behaviour, they claimed, his mother would turn up and accuse them of bullying. (Selena thought of the exhaustion Lou Sokaluk must have felt, marching in yet again to protect her overgrown child.) Further up the ranks, the university’s administrators were not greatly interested in the garden staff’s squabbles.
The supervisor told the police he had to be careful about where on the campus he sent Brendan to work. He’d been seen peering in the windows of student dormitories, so during term time he was assigned to other places, although not the childcare centre, because the mothers apparently found him creepy. He couldn’t work on the golf course, because golfers complained that he picked up balls in play, or ploughed over them with the mower. As a result, he was banned from driving on the campus.
The supervisor had prepared a list of Brendan’s disagreeable behaviour to give to Monash’s human resources department. It included:
It was hard, after eighteen years, to work out who had launched this epic quarrel or if there was any way to end it. But Brendan reckoned he’d been blamed for things he hadn’t done and his fellow gardeners reckoned he wrought mayhem. They’d grown weary of babysitting someone so childish: not a funny, likeable naif – the daytime-movie version of an intellectually disabled person – but this ill-kempt, complicated man who left a trail of trouble.
On 7 June 2006, Sokaluk and his supervisor – the man who’d compiled the list – had their last run-in.
Later, the supervisor claimed he had assigned Sokaluk certain tasks and returned to find that ‘he had just downed tools and walked off’. He then received a text message: I,m going to comit suitside by taken a lot of pill,s so I can die and not put up with youes.
The supervisor contacted the university’s security team, the police, community services, Brendan’s parents, and the local hospital. Eventually, Brendan turned up at his doctor’s office. He told the doctor he had been driving along winding Jeeralang West Road looking, without success, for a logging truck to crash his car into.
Brendan’s family urged him to put together an account of his last day of work, which he emailed to the university:
Subject : this exsplains what happen and why I losted.
[My supervisor] had a angry look on his face I was worried for my safety again. He told me to get in the ute. I got into the ute slightly sceared of what he was going to do towards me again. He drove donw to the sports field on the way down he was yellen at me. Sayen this. When I fucken tell you to do something I actspect you to do it and not tell me your fucken girlyback herts when sitten on the gator [tractor] seat what are you a fucken girl I,m sicken tired of putten up with you if I had m y way you will not be here at all. As I look across to him he seid to me I,m going to smash your fucken head in do you hear me you fucken asswhole. I kept quit then he seid to me. You fucken retart answer me now. I kept quit. He drove the ute very farst over the kerb and stop at the sport field . . . He also stated no one likes you and no one whants you here because your a dumb fucken retart . . . you fucken do what I whant or you whount work here any more. I steard at him. He turn and walked of I watch as he left I stood there for awile then I sat in the sun on acorrect ledge. I had no one to talk to about this I felt alone and sad. I got up and chip some weeds and prun a bit for awile. I got sader and sader then I decited to leave. I sat in the car for a while. I was so sad I started to cry about what happen . . . I decide to flee for the hills to find a mack truck to smash my car into. Un forgerly I could not find one. I drove up and down many dirt tracks looken for one. Arther a while I setile down and deiced to go to the doctors to get help. Now I,m of work on stress leave and safe away from [my supervisor] he can,t get me here. I SWEAR THIS TO BE ALL TRUE OF ALL THE AVENT THAT TOOK PLACE. FROM BRENDAN SOKALUK. I all so have noterfived the uoin over this matter.
His supervisor disputed this record of events. However, after years of mutual grievances, the university wanted Brendan Sokaluk’s employment terminated and he was paid out.
His world now retracted further. He might have been impaired, but not to the extent that he couldn’t recognise other people’s contempt for a ‘fucken retart’. He searched for jobs on the internet, which also offered the easiest place for him to socialise. Online, he met Alexandra, via her Myspace page.
Alexandra worked in a nearby aged-care facility, and in her profile picture – the one later plastered across the internet, showing her in a CFA uniform and angel wings – she stood in a verdant Gippsland garden, a tiny view of a power station’s chimneys visible behind her. As an infant, she claimed, she’d fallen into a bath and suffered severe burns to her face, arms and torso. When she grew older: ‘kids was so mean to me at school. I was outsider. I could never fit in . . . it hurts rest of my life what they did.’
The pair chatted online for two months before they met. Alexandra was also a vulnerable person, who lived with her parents and needed their help navigating the world. Brendan would pick her up from their house and drive her back to Sheoke Grove. The new couple watched movies: ‘action and war and violence DVDs . . . Brendan did not like the sort of comedy and girly DVDs that I liked,’ she later told police. Nevertheless, within weeks she had moved in with him. ‘I thought we were in love.’ One day she announced on Myspace: ‘[t]he princess is getting married,’ and Brendan responded, ‘I love Alexandra more than anything else.’
In their brief of evidence, the police listed the various web searches they’d found on Sokaluk’s computer: ‘BRAIDLE DESS COURSES’ – Alexandra was dyslexic – and links to advice on wedding planning, hen’s night celebrations (‘my spa party – indulge yourself with home facials’), eloping, and luxury honeymoon accommodation.
Brendan’s father still came over to clean the house three times a week. As Lou was working, he’d acquired the day-to-day tasks of watching out for their son. He’d take Brendan grocery shopping, deal with his bills and paperwork, and dole out his allowance. (Brendan told Alexandra that someone he’d trusted at the university had touched him inappropriately and he’d been given a payout.) Meanwhile, the couple started watching their weight and attending literacy classes at the local community centre. They bought a dog from the RSPCA: a small, tan-coloured terrier. Despite the dog being female, Brendan named it in tribute to the recently deceased racing car driver, Peter Brock.
Brendan and Alexandra shared a bed, but in the three or four months they lived together they never had sex. Nevertheless when Brendan was told by another internet acquaintance that Alexandra had recently slept with someone else, he was enraged. According to Alexandra, ‘He kept saying, “How could you?” and calling me a whore.’ About a week later, she called her parents, who came and picked her up. Brendan changed the locks.
That had happened a year ago.
Yes, he’d been angry at the time, but it hadn’t seemed to Kaz and Lou that he’d spent the next twelve months desperately lovelorn, or hell-bent on revenge, as the newspapers made out. He had his own quiet routine. And routine was very important to Brendan. Although it might have seemed bizarre to outsiders, it hadn’t struck his parents as strange that he was up at the plantation during a heatwave. His days revolved around a limited set of activities, such as searching roadsides and gullies for old scrap metal, tinkering in his shed and gardening. He’d grow vegetables in the planting beds that were free of junk, and give his produce to those he considered friends. And the junk often had some value. The Sokaluks believed he burnt things in his yard not, as the media intimated, because he was some sick pyromaniac, but to salvage the precious metals: copper inside electrical cords, and gold from computer circuit boards. It was economic, not pathological.
Twice a week he did his paper round. He went to bingo, and looked forward to car expos, or visiting the Rosedale Speedway with his father, where they watched Crash n Bash V8 super sedans racing. He tried to keep up with the literacy classes even after Alexandra left, and he took the teacher vegetables to thank her for her help. This teacher never saw Brendan angry or confrontational. If others in the class argued he’d sit back and wouldn’t get involved. She was another who lost her house in the fire.
Neither Kaz nor Lou could believe he’d lit the blaze. Each day there was another ‘revelation’ about what their son had supposedly done, and they tried to navigate between what seemed truth and the sharp turns required to look at the rest.
Selena had sat in interview rooms with a lot of families whose children were accused of despicable things. Many parents were just doing the best they could, and that wasn’t always a great deal. Often they were angry or depressed, having been ravaged by misfortune themselves, and couldn’t stop thinking that their own lives were hopeless. She thought the way Kaz and Lou managed to care for Brendan was an achievement in itself. In this regard, at least, Brendan Sokaluk had been lucky.
When at last, in July, six months after the fire, the police handed down their final brief, it totalled more than 5800 pages, with hundreds of supplementary documents. Brendan faced ten counts of arson causing death, and 181 other charges, the majority relating to criminal damage. He was not charged with the death of 86-year-old Gertrude Martin, who suffered a heart attack while her house burned down. As she’d had a pre-existing heart condition, it was too difficult to prove that the fire was the sole reason she died.
Soon Selena McCrickard was moved to another department within Legal Aid and reassigned to other cases. She’d given so much energy to Brendan’s defence that she was gutted by the change. Later, Lou Sokaluk asked for her to be reinstated, but Legal Aid’s managers already had a legal team in place.
In the period it took to determine whether his case would reach trial, Brendan cycled through a number of lawyers. It had become clear to the Sokaluks that the law could warp the physics of time. Their son’s arrest had happened at full speed and yet the legal process seemed never to get out of a crawl. They were battling now over the future, the present, the past, in torturous slow motion. Meanwhile, they worried about Brendan coping in the maximum-security jail, who he’d be meeting there, whether he’d be safe.
Selena did not often stay in touch with her clients, but she’d become close to Lou. She wanted her to know that someone understood how crushing the legal process could be for all the families involved, and that she cared beyond the hours that were billable.
She visited Lou when, fifteen months after the fire, in June 2010, Brendan’s committal hearing began. The older woman’s hair, she noticed, had turned from dark brown to white. During this proceeding, Lou heard about the family that lost their pet horse. Lou had been a passionate rider as a girl, and that loss symbolised for her every other. She told the barrister she wished she could afford to buy those people a new horse, but she didn’t have the money.
Defence lawyers, Selena often wanted to explain, don’t set out to say, ‘Look at my client, he’s a fucking great bloke.’ Rather the point was: ‘Look at my client, who may or may not have done this terrible thing. This is the issue with this person, and he could be your child.’
The Sokaluks had now spent the greater part of their lives as ‘the parents of the retard’. Kaz had ignored the looks people gave them when Brendan babbled on in public in a foghorn voice; Lou had fought over and over to protect her son from all those she felt deliberately gave him a hard time. She wasn’t going to stop now. It was devastating to think he could have set the fire, and to know that most of their neighbours believed he had, but he’d been picked on all his life: what if this was no different? Until she heard Brendan say he’d deliberately lit up the plantation, it was a betrayal to believe it. Until her son told her he’d done it, she wouldn’t stop trying to defend him, even if she lay awake wondering.
In the meantime, Lou said to Selena, what about poor Ron Philpott?
On Black Saturday, Philpott, a local CFA member and ‘fence hand’, had been the first person to report a fire near an old mill close to his run-down shack in Murrindindi, a rural region a hundred kilometres north-east of Melbourne. Before long, the Arson Squad considered him a suspect. This shabbily dressed man with his sunken face and busted up nose was soon on prime time television, proclaiming his innocence.
Forty people had died in that fire, and the suspicion cast upon him made his life hellish. But after a thirty-month long investigation, the Arson Squad quietly announced, in June 2011, he was no longer a person of interest. They’d concluded that the most likely cause of this fire was a faulty powerline, as Philpott had told the police from the start.
What if Brendan had also been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and falsely accused?
Eventually, nearly three years after Black Saturday, following a lengthy, stop-start process of psychological evaluation, Brendan was deemed by various specialists competent to stand trial. He was charged with lighting the fire at age thirty-nine. He was forty-two before his court case began.
During the trial, Selena was heavily pregnant with her son.
When you hold your first baby and you imagine the life they might lead, you don’t foresee the infant growing but not growing up. You don’t picture a child-man, approaching middle age, still sending out birthday invitations to the few people who tolerate him, with further directions scrawled on the bottom: ‘Bring lots of lollies!’ ‘Bring me a present!’
You don’t foresee yourself visiting him in jail, and his telling you that he’d prefer to talk through glass because after ‘contact visits’ the guards make him strip down and spread his buttocks to check for contraband.
You don’t predict the ferocity with which people will come to despise him.
Or that you’ll suffer nightmares about an inferno he is charged with lighting.
Selena believed that a lesser person than Lou would have crumbled under the same pressure. The barrister hoped that if – fate forbid – she was ever pushed to the place this mother had been, she could summon some of her grace.